James Fenimore Cooper by Robert Emmet Long, and: “The Guardian of the Law” Authority and Identity in James Fenimore Cooper by Charles Hansford Adams (review)

146 WesternAmerican Literature JamesFenimore Cooper. By Robert Emmet Long. (New York: Continuum Publish­ ing Company, 1990. 213 pages, $19.95.) “The Guardian of the Law”: Authority and, Identity in James Fenimore Cooper. By Charles Hansford Adams. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. 151 pages, $25.00.) Current revisioning, Robert Emmet Long implies, should replace Twain’s “canonical”debunking of Cooper (Long reminds us that Austen, George Eliot and James also exasperated Twain) with estimates as complex as, for example, that offered by Charles Hansford Adams. Long prods us toward this process in his conclusion to an introductory study which isa cut above the usual compilation ofplot summaries, in somewhat belabored comparisons of Cooper to Melville and Hawthorne. Melville pursued the “newliterature [announced in RedRover (1828)] in which the ocean serves as a theater ofmetaphysical or psychological engagement”but liberated it from religious thinking in Cooper “so strictly orthodox as to prohibit doubts or freedom of speculation.” Hawthorne shared Cooper’s fascination with Italy as an alternative to American limitations, but his responses to a transcendent forest diverged from Natty Bumppo’s artistic vision of divine order into Hester Prynne’s “enigmatic and sinister”moral wilderness. Long’s agenda in surveying more than thirty books and evaluating the critical responses (complimenting and complementing Marius Bewley, H. Daniel Peck and D. H. Lawrence, while taking issue with Leslie Fiedler and James Grossman) is essentially anticipatory. Cooper anticipated Howellsian realism in dissecting Templeton in Pioneers (1823), the raft voyage ofHuck and Jim in Miles Wallingford’s Hudson river voyage with black Neb in Afloat and Ashore (1844), Edith Wharton’s invaded gentry and Faulkner’s invading Snopeses in conflicts between the Dutch-English Littlepages and Yankee squat­ ters, the Newcomes, in the LittlepageManuscripts (1845-46). Long evaluates Home asFound (1838) as “perhaps the earliest international novel of manners of any significance by an American” and considers the contrast of Naples and New York bays as ofenjoyment and usefulness in Water-Witch (1830) worthy ofJames. Cooper’scareer traces a rather complex pessimism concluding in cross-dressing and degraded femininity inJack Tier (1848) and in the distinction of a defense attorney for feminist Mary Monson in Ways of the Hour (1850) of blowing his nose with his fingers. Adams devotes the “Coda”of his legal study ofCooper to this same obscure final novel, in which society is so separated from its history that “both law and the conception ofselfit promotes are hopelessly lost in the flux of the meaning­ less now.” Adams’s approach is an ingenious integration of American legal history and nine novels exploring early nineteenth-century conflicts among upholders of English common law as linked to natural or higher order, those Reviews 147 compromising this tradition through democratic statutory law, and proponents of the kind of romantic individualism reflected in Emerson’s “Politics.” In sea tales like RedRoverand TwoAdmirals (1842) successfuljuxtaposing of nature, law, and selfwas relatively easy for Cooper, since the ocean represented the higher order, a revelation offered to the hero “to ‘read’correctly the world, and thus realize his most profound self.” But land novels provided a context of moral chaos and conflict. “When the law divides man unnaturally into warring legal and nonlegal selves or when it facilitates the disruption of social bonds by individuals willing to manipulate legal forms and rhetoric for personal ends, the law,” Cooper felt, “loses its legitimacy.” This formula justified the Revolution, which in Lionel Lincoln (1825) Cooper tried to exorcise of violent personal interests. In Spy (1821) and Pioneerspatriarchs like General George Washington and Judge William Temple attempted, if inadequately, to rescue civil law from the moral myopia of deductive reasoning. The crisis period for Cooper and the nation was that between these “Founders,” who acknowledged linguistic documents (the Bible, wills, etc.) as emblems of “an order that takes its authority from time,”and the demagoguery eventually undermining the Constitution through state laws. In the Littlepage Manuscripts Cooper debated these adverse forces and sacrificed his art to them. On the eve ofLincoln and the CivilWar the dialogue between authority and the private self sought definitions beyond Cooper’s abilities, argues Adams,just as the stakes, slavery and sectional rights, eclipsed Cooper...